Golden Fleeced Fleeced Lying about Atlantis ... Part Two this book will examine the continuing...

Golden Fleeced

l JASON CoLAVITo

Golden Fleeced Lying about Atlantis, Aliens, and Argonauts in Greek Myth

By Jason Colavito

ALSO BY JASON COLAVITO The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop

Culture (Prometheus, 2005) Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the

Horror Genre (McFarland, 2008) “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from

the Enlightenment to World War I (McFarland, 2009)

© 2011 Jason Colavito. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) You are free to copy, distribute, and transmit the work pursuant to the restriction that you credit the work to Jason Colavito and link to the originating website, http://www.JasonColavito.com. You may not alter the work or use it commercially without the express written permission of the author. Part One of this ebook contains some material that originally appeared on JasonColavito.com. A version of Part Two was originally published as “Golden Fleeced,” in eSkeptic (May 5, 2010). Cover image: Waters off Thasos, Greece. Photo credit: BuckRogers21 (Wikimedia Commons)

Y

Contents

Introduction 1

Part One: Ancient Advanced Civilizations in Greek Myth? 2

Part Two: Extraterrestrials in Greek Myth? 18

Notes 28

Works Cited 29

GOLDEN FLEECED ● 1

Introduction

NCIENT GREECE LOOMS LARGE in the modern

imagination as the font of Western civilization. Its architecture,

philosophy, language, and mythology live on in the modern

world, and its influence has permeated every period in Western history

from the Roman era through the present day. Because Greek

accomplishments are so fundamental to the Western world, there has

been no shortage of attempts to rewrite the history and mythology of

ancient Greece to suit modern ends. This process goes back centuries,

but the modern practice of the wholesale appropriation of Greek

mythology as support for fringe claims and pseudoscience begins,

essentially, with Ignatius Donnelly, the American politician whose 1882

book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World argued that the Greek gods were

originally the kings of Atlantis, mythologized and worshipped by

ignorant later Greeks.

Part One of this book will look at several recent claims that

misuse Greek mythology and especially the writings of Plato and Homer

to lend spurious credence to speculation about the existence of Atlantis

and the presence of advanced technology in pre-Greek times. Then, in

Part Two this book will examine the continuing influence of Robert

Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which misused Greek mythology to

support the proposition that amphibious extraterrestrials bequeathed

civilization to early humans and in the process fooled scholars and the

public alike into believing pseudoscience.

Together, these investigations demonstrate not just the ways

Greek mythology can be mined to support outré propositions, but also

these investigations show the continuing power and influence of ancient

Greece more than two millennia after Greek civilization succumbed to

the power of Rome.

A

JASON COLAVITO ● 2

PART ONE

ANCIENT

ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS

IN GREEK MYTH?

u


N MARCH 2011, THE NATIONAL Geographic Channel

screened an hour-long documentary chronicling the efforts of

Hartford University archaeologist Richard Freund to find the lost

city of Atlantis. According to Freund, his research indicated Atlantis was

located near Cadiz in southern Spain, and the city was destroyed by a

tsunami. He also claimed to have found the actual archaeological

remains of the lost city. The program, titled Finding Atlantis, presented

a few intriguing finds and then spun those discoveries into a web of

pseudoscience masquerading as science. Nevertheless, the documentary

created a media sensation due to the imprimatur of the National

Geographic Society and the unfortunate timing of the program, airing

just days after a tsunami devastated much of northern Japan following a

9.0 magnitude earthquake. Reporters were quick to accept the Atlantis

claims and to draw parallels between the lost city and events in Japan.

An article in Newsweek by Simon Winchester, the bestselling British

author, uncritically proclaimed the find genuine and ranked Atlantis

beside Pompeii on the list of great lost cities.

Freund’s claim was the latest in a long line of attempts to find

a reality for the lost continent outside the imagination of its creator, the

Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BCE), who invented the continent

as an allegorical way of criticizing the civilization of contemporary

Athens. No evidence for Atlantis has been found in any ancient material

(writings, inscriptions, pottery, etc.) prior to Plato’s dialogues the

Timaeus and the Critias (c. 360 BCE).

I


This chapter will discuss what would be needed to prove the

existence of Atlantis, and then it will evaluate Prof. Freund’s claims,

followed by a discussion of two other improbably claims about ancient

Greek mythology. First, this chapter will review an attempt to link the

Atlantis story and Greek myth to a fringe belief that the planet Venus

nearly destroyed earth in prehistory, and then it will examine a scholarly

publication claiming that Homer’s epic poems prove the existence of

advanced robotics and hydrofoil naval technology in the Mycenaean

age.

Proving Atlantis To begin thinking critically about the media circus surrounding

Robert Freund’s claim that Atlantis has been found in Spain, let’s first

consider how one would prove that a new discovery was “really”

Atlantis. It isn’t as simple as finding an ancient site and then trying to

match it to Plato’s description, no matter how loosely one interprets

Plato’s texts (composed c. 360 BCE).

A major hurdle is proposing a plausible method of transmission

whereby knowledge of a given site can be retained and communicated

through the centuries. How would Plato have known the details of

whatever archaeological remains you’ve dug up? In his dialogues, Plato

claims that his knowledge of Atlantis derives from an ancient Athenian

statesman named Solon, who lived three centuries earlier and who got

his information in turn from the Egyptians. If we take this at face value,

we would need to prove a relationship between Egypt and the unnamed

site prior to the age of Solon (638-538 BCE) and Egyptian knowledge of

the site’s layout, politics, internal organization, and destruction. We

would also need to prove how and where Solon’s information was

retained and communicated for roughly three centuries between him

and Plato. Needless to say, there is not a single scrap of evidence—no

statue, no vase painting, no inscription, no papyrus fragment, no wall


painting—nothing that indicates Egyptian or Greek knowledge of

anything like Atlantis prior to 360 BCE.

Contrast this with an actual documented instance of historical

memory. In the Iliad (c. eighth century BCE), Homer records the story

of Troy, long believed to have been a legendary city as mythical as

Atlantis. But Homer included bits of genuine Bronze Age information,

including references to a helmet made of boar’s tusks that was used only

in the Mycenaean Age (prior to 1200 BCE), which indicated a core of

genuine history underneath layers of myth. (Plato’s Atlantis story

contains no Bronze Age or earlier details.) The Greeks, however, lived

among the ruins of the Mycenaean Age but knew so little of that time

that they assumed the ruins were the work of giants called Cyclopes

(Figure 1) and they thought the men of that era demigods. These same

people somehow retained street-level knowledge of Atlantis but not their

own cities?

Figure 1: Mycenaean Cyclopean architecture. (Library of Congress)


Homer’s geographic information led the German explorer

Heinrich Schliemann to a site in Turkey where he found a city that has

been identified as the site of Troy. However, Homer’s information was

not perfectly accurate, but rather highly distorted, the result of imperfect

transmission across centuries, contaminated with error and more recent

information.

But this is not all the ancient evidence. Homer was not alone in

mentioning Troy—an entire series of myths and epics (known as the

Epic Cycle) by many hands recorded parts of its story, as did vase

paintings. We also have Bronze Age Hittite records (c. 1250 BCE)

recording interactions with Wilusa (another name for Ilion, or Troy) as

well as hostility between Wilusa and a group called the Ahhiyawa,

identified as the Achaeans (Greeks) of Homer’s Iliad. The Hittite

records confirm that a ruler named Alaksandu once reigned in Troy, just

as in Homer the son of Troy’s king is Alexander (also called Paris).

Alaksandu worshipped the god Apaliunas, identified as Apollo, the god

who protected Troy and Paris-Alexander in the Iliad. These

identifications, while somewhat controversial, are accepted by the

majority of scholars as indicating Hittite knowledge of Troy.

In this case, we have contemporary records, an archaeological

site, and later Greek recollections of genuine Bronze Age material. These

many strands work together to tell us that the site Schliemann found in

Turkey is the place known as Troy. What do we have to support claims

for Atlantis? We have Plato’s (fictional) dialogues, and nothing else. The

Egyptians, who recorded interactions with ancient peoples ranging from

the Minoans and the Mycenaeans to envoys from the Near East, are

silent about Atlanteans. The Greeks included Atlantis in no myths,

legends, or epics. Nearly every ancient city that was genuinely

prominent in the Bronze Age has myths associated with it, even if that

city ceased to exist in later ages, as Martin Nilsson explained in his classic

The Mycenaean Origins of Greek Mythology almost a century ago. But


somehow Atlantis got left out. Even the ancient authors themselves were

fairly certain Plato made it all up.

In absence of any evidence outside of Plato for Greek

knowledge of Atlantis, and in the absence of any plausible way for the

Greeks (or even the Egyptians) to have known about the destruction of

Atlantis, or proof that they did, we must conclude that Atlantis was

what Plato meant it to be: a fictional double for Athens.

Atlantis in Spain? With this information, what can we say about claims that

Atlantis was found in Spain?

Figure 2: Atlantis: The Antediluvian

World, the grandfather of all Atlantis

theories. (Library of Congress)

Richard Freund, who

previously appeared in a 2004

Nova special where he

identified artifacts found in

Israel as part of the legendary

Temple treasure lost after the

Roman invasion of Jerusalem,

argued that a site on the

southern coast of Spain near the

city of Cadiz is Plato’s Atlantis

as well as the biblical city of

Tarshish, a trading center

mentioned briefly in the books

of Chronicles, Kings, and elsewhere. The theory itself is not new. E. M.

Whishaw proposed the theory in a 1928 book, Atlantis in Andalusia,

including an identification of Plato’s city with the ancient port of

Tartessos and thus the biblical city of Tarshish. Tartessos was an ancient


civilization of the first millennium BCE widely discussed in antiquity

and whose cultural area is known archaeologically as spreading

throughout southern Spain. Richard Freund merely adopted the

Spanish Atlantis theory wholesale, but unlike Whishaw, backed it up

with an allegedly new archeological discovery. Freund claimed that the

Spanish site near Cadiz conforms to Plato’s description of Atlantis

because geophysical scans indicate that the city stood on an island

surrounded by water, as Plato described. Nevertheless, epistemological

and logical problems remain.

Plato, however, said Atlantis was “larger than Libya and Asia

together” (the buried island Freund advocates is nowhere near that

large), and composed of several concentric rings with artificial canals

connecting the rings of land in a riparian system (again, the Spanish site

has not been proven to match). Finally, Plato claimed that the island

was destroyed by an earthquake 9,000 years before Plato’s time (c.

9,400 BCE). Again, the Spanish site does not match. Initial radiocarbon

dates place it anywhere from 5,000 to 2,400 years old.

Nevertheless, Freund argued that the circular shape of the site

and the fact that it was possibly destroyed by a tsunami proved that the

site was the legendary Atlantis, and he repeatedly emphasized how close

the match was—close if you agree to change the facts that Plato wrote to

“more plausible” versions. Doing so, of course, means that Freund is

free to reconstruct an imaginary Atlantis of his own devising, one which

is very different from Plato’s but which he can imaginatively recreate to

match anything he happened to find on the ground.

Especially ludicrous was his attempt to explain a carving of a

warrior holding a sword and a shield as a soldier “guarding” an aerial

map of Atlantis, claiming the circular shield with its pattern of

concentric circles, so very similar to other ancient shields, was really a

2,000-year-old remembered tradition of the layout of Atlantis! This in

an age that did not make any other aerial maps! Earlier, Freund and his

team were giddy with excitement after finding geometric-shaped rocks


that they thought were the walls of Atlantis. They were completely

natural in formation, but still Freund counted them as evidence on the

grounds that Atlanteans “might” have built walls with them anyway—

underwater, apparently, since they formed beneath the ocean.

There is no doubt, of course, that there is a real archaeological

site buried in southern Spain. What it is exactly, we just don’t know.

However, let us give Freund the benefit of the doubt and agree that

everything he claims about its age and layout are true. What does this

tell us? Nothing, actually. Freund can propose no method by which this

fallen city is somehow remembered in street-level detail from Spain to

Egypt to Plato over the course of thousands upon thousands of years

without leaving a single trace in the records of Egypt or Greece or

anywhere else. Not a single inscription, or papyrus, or statue, or vase

painting. Nothing at all from 5,000 BCE until 360 BCE when Plato

wrote the Timaeus and the Critias, the first ever mention of Atlantis. By

this standard, we must take the Cyclopes, the Odyssey, the Underworld,

and the Golden Fleece as true people and events, too, since they are

amply better documented in the ancient record. Or, alternately, we must

seek out Thomas More’s Utopia.

Most disturbing, I think, was Freund’s attempt to argue that

Atlantis was really the biblical city of Tarshish. This is the entirety of

what is known of Tarshish, from 2 Chronicles 9:21: “every three years

once came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and

apes, and peacocks.” (This is repeated in Kings 10:22). Obviously,

Freund said, this is Atlantis because both Tarshish and Atlantis dealt in

“metals,” the only ancient cities, he said, to do so. This is patently false,

since other ancient sites, like Colchis on the Black Sea, were famous for

their metalworking. Incidentally, southern Spain boasts neither apes

(native to sub-Saharan Africa), nor peacocks (native to India and parts

of sub-Saharan Africa), nor ivory (Africa again). This kind of Bible-

mongering serves little purpose except to try to rope in Atlantis as

confirmation of the Bible’s literal truth—something Freund


inadvertently emphasized when using biblical terminology such as the

“holy of holies” to describe decidedly non-Hebrew sites. It is no

coincidence that Richard Freund’s specialty is biblical archaeology and

Judaic studies, not Classical, Bronze Age, or Neolithic archaeology.

But let us grant him his point and pretend that Atlantis is

Tarshish. If this is true, then we have a contradiction. Tarshish traded

with the Israelites during the reign of Solomon, traditionally around the

tenth century BCE. This is thousands of years after Plato’s Atlantis sunk

beneath the waves (9400 BCE), and at least a thousand years off from

the proposed dates when the Spanish site was destroyed (possibly

around 2000 BCE). Never mind that the books of Chronicles and Kings

were likely composed no earlier than 560 BCE, at which time Tarshish

must still have been an active port—one still in operation when Jonah

tried to sail there in the Book of Jonah (composed c. 500 BCE). So

Tarshish and Atlantis, like Schrödinger’s cat, both exist and do not exist,

are active and destroyed, simultaneously. The only way to make the two

into one is to change Plato, and once you change Plato you are no

longer looking for “Atlantis” but are instead naming whatever you find

in honor of Plato’s fictional allegory.

Apparently Freund dropped in to an active Spanish

archaeological investigation into an actual ancient city, ongoing since

2005, and has hijacked it to generate publicity for his research into the

connection between Solomon and Atlantis to prove the Bible true. Here

is what the Spanish anthropologist Juan Villarias-Robles told the

Telegraph newspaper about Freund:

Richard Freund was a newcomer to our project and appeared

to be involved in his own very controversial issue concerning

King Solomon’s search for ivory and gold in Tartessos, the well

documented settlement in the Donaña area established in the

first millennium BC. He became involved in what we were

doing and provided funding for probes through his connections


with National Geographic and Associated Producers. He left

and the film company told us the documentary would be

finished in April or May. But we did not hear from him and

are very surprised it has appeared so soon and makes such

fanciful claims. (Owen)

But Freund was not the only one making fanciful claims about

Atlantis and ancient Greece in early 2011, or even the only one to use

such claims to further an agenda to prove the Bible true. Two books

released within weeks of each other in early 2011 both tried to make the

case for a lost, advanced civilization lurking behind the stately façade of

ancient Greece.

Atlantis and Catastrophism On February 25, 2011, Washington, D.C.’s conservative daily,

The Washington Times, devoted an unusual amount of space to a work

of pseudoscience from Algora Publishing, a small press that distributes a

number of books on “alternative” archaeology. The paper is not known

for its coverage of archaeology, nor as a champion of small press

literature. This was a highly unusual review. Fox News columnist

Martin Sieff guest-wrote a lengthy review of Emmett Sweeney’s newly

published Atlantis: The Evidence from Science (Algora, 2010), praising

the book for its evenhanded exploration of the science supporting claims

that Atlantis really existed. This review, however, seemed to reflect a

hidden anti-science, perhaps even creationist, agenda.

Sweeney is the author of a number of volumes defending the

work of Immanuel Velikovsky, the 20th century writer who claimed that

the planet Venus was really a comet that swung by earth in prehistory,

influencing the course of civilization when it parted the Red Sea,

destroyed Minoan civilization, and what-have-you. According to

Velikovsky and Sweeney, earth’s history has been grossly distorted by

historians and must be set right. Velikovsky, whom Sweeney follows,


claimed that the Dark Age between the Mycenaean era and Archaic

Greece (the period from 1200 BCE to 800 BCE) did not exist and was

the creation of close-minded scholars. By happy coincidence, if one

accepts Velikovsky’s claims, the historical chronology given in the Bible

could be reconciled with Egyptian king lists and records, thus proving

that the Bible was literally true.

None of this was discussed in Sieff’s Washington Times review,

which instead attempted to give legitimacy to Sweeney’s catastrophism

by giving a foothold to his work on Atlantis. At no time did Sieff discuss

a troubling conflict of interest. According to the Velikovsky Encyclopedia, Sieff was a founding member of the pro-Velikovsky

group, the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, a former editor of its

magazine, and an active proponent of catastrophism. He wrote more

than two dozen articles in support of catastrophism, some as late as the

1990s (“Martin Sieff”). By hiding Sweeney’s connection to Velikovsky,

as well as his own, Sieff played the part of the disinterested journalist,

legitimizing an ideological agenda in the guise of journalism.

Sieff even went beyond Sweeney to argue that a “sophisticated

global, seafaring civilization certainly existed in the geological conditions

before the last ice age.” He based this claim on the work of Charles

Hapgood, a professor who misread ancient maps in the mid-20th

century and imagined that they showed Antarctica, not officially

discovered until 1818. These maps were supposedly so accurate only a

sophisticated global culture could have made them; however, repeated

debunkings over the past fifty years demonstrated conclusively that

Hapgood was wrong, a fact even Hapgood seemed to acknowledge

before his death (Frtize 193-201).

That Sieff relies on discredited and false evidence to support a

radical rewriting of ancient history is no surprise; everyone who supports

“alternative” archaeology does so at some point. What is extremely

surprising is that the Washington Times ran this bit of rank

pseudoscience. Here, it seems that a hidden agenda was at work. As


noted above, acceptance of Atlantis was seen as a stepping stone to

legitimizing Velikovskian theories—or at the very least, de-legitimizing

secular archaeology. Once the accepted, secular story of cultural

evolution has been questioned, creationist theories become that much

easier to put on par with actual science.

Figure 3: Donnelly’s map of Atlantis’s empire. (Library of Congress)

Given that the Washington Times is a known outlet for

conservative attacks on science, as well as for the views of its owner, the

Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the entire affair seems to

be of a piece—covertly attempting to subvert science in the name of

dogma, catastrophist, religious, or otherwise.

Ancient Greece and Advanced Technology A much more serious and supposedly scholarly claim about

ancient Greece and its exotic mysteries came this time from modern

Greece itself. Greek mechanical engineer S. A. Paipetis’s recent The Unknown Technology in Homer (2005) was translated into English and

released in 2010. The book purported to be a mechanical engineer’s


evaluation of extraordinary and precocious technological knowledge

embedded in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, two of the foundational texts

of the Western, tradition composed sometime around the eight century

BCE. According to the author, this anomalous knowledge demonstrates

that the Mycenaeans, the ancient people of whom Homer’s poems sang,

had advanced modern technology c. 1600-1200 BCE. The volume was

published under the aegis of the academic publisher Springer’s History of Mechanism and Machine Science series, making it a somewhat higher

grade of pseudoscience pretending toward legitimacy, but pseudoscience

nonetheless.

The first third of the book is an incoherent set of digressions,

most of which have no bearing on the subject of ancient technology.

Instead, we are treated to works of Renaissance and modern art and

discussions of the Greek-revival style vacation house built by the Austro-

Hungarian empress Elisabeth, whose nickname is embarrassingly

mistranslated as “Sissy” instead of “Sisi.” What does the existence of a

nineteenth century vacation house have to do with Mycenaean

technology? Unfortunately, this tendency toward digression and

irrelevancy mars an already short book (200 pages) with about 50-75

pages of padding. Worse still, the translation from the author’s original

(modern) Greek to English is stilted and awkward, with innumerable

mistakes of grammar and spelling that are by turn humorous or

obfuscating.

The author demonstrates a clear ignorance of the ancient

material he purports to analyze. In Chapter 11, he follows a long-

disproved idea that the so-called Orphic Argonautica (c. 450 CE)

predated the Odyssey (c. 700 BCE) (Paipetis 83). Earlier, the author

assumes that the river Acheron in Epirus is the actual river Acheron

flowing through Hades and to which Odysseus sails (Paipetis 46). While

later Greeks identified the two, the location of the physical Acheron in

western Greece hardly matches the description of the infernal Acheron

flowing at the ends of the Ocean. His discussions of Greek mythology


are everywhere tinged with a non-specialists over-simplification and

ignorance of contemporary work in the field, especially complications

and controversies that would undermine his simple thesis.

Relying on long-outdated studies of Greek myth and history

(including the early twentieth century work of Arthur Evans and the

Depression-era studies of Martin Nilsson largely to the exclusion of any

modern work), Paipetis builds a house of cards whereby the

presumption that the Mycenaeans had advanced technology leads him

to interpret mythological events as technological descriptions, thus

“proving” the existence of the technology.

One example can stand for them all. In discussing Odysseus’

passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the author assumes that the

description records a Greek discourse on the physics of vortexes. Thus,

Homer’s phrase “drive ship by as fast as you can” should, in the

author’s words, be interpreted to mean “move fast, to account [for]

speed loss due to friction and remain in course instead of diving to the

bottom” (Paipetis 88). This he compares to the “gravitational sling”

used by NASA to launch spacecraft out of the solar system by utilizing

Jupiter’s gravitational force. However, the “friction” is the author’s own

interpolation, a scientific term hardly necessary for the Greeks to

understand the concept of going fast to escape from a whirlpool.

The author also believes that Homer’s descriptions of the

automata built by the smith god Hephaestus represent descriptions of

real robots with artificial intelligence. However, it has long been known

that the ancients had mechanical or clockwork animals. The Byzantine

emperors were particularly famous for their mechanical lions and birds.

A poetic exaggeration of these real-life marvels is likely all that lies

behind Hephaestus’s “robots,” with no naively literal reading of the

Odyssey or speculation about ancient electricity necessary. (The author

backtracks some and does state that electricity and computing

technology are not “known to be” available to run the robots [Paipetis

111].)


Figure 4: Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis, Johann Freidrich Füssli, 1794-1796.

(Wikimedia Commons)

The author’s claim that an invisible net used by the god

Hephaestus in the Odyssey to capture Ares and Aphrodite (Od. 8.266-

366) is evidence of manmade Kevlar or a related material is simply

ridiculous:

Such materials are rather modern technological achievements,

e.g., glass and carbon fibres, or even organic fibres such as

Kevlar. If such materials were available in Homer’s era,

undoubtedly that civilization was marked by this highly

developed technology. (Paipetis 104)


His identification of the boats belonging to a people called the

Phaecians as “probably a high speed jet hydrofoil” is laughable. Homer

sang that the Phaecians’ boats had no pilots but sailed according to

projected thoughts (Od. 7.555-563; 13.76-92). There is no reason to

imagine magical boats as a thousand-year memory of Mycenaean-era

technology if the only evidence for their existence is Homer’s own poem,

a poem filled with all sorts of magic that no appeal to technology could

ever sufficiently explain.

That this study was published by Springer (albeit in the

mechanics rather than classics arena) has given it a false legitimacy that

may deceive the unwary into assuming that this is a scholarly work on

Greek history. Instead, it is a work of rank speculation masquerading as

science, using false analogies and wishful thinking to recreate a lost

world that never was. In Part Two we will look at another work of

pseudoscience that for more than three decades has used the trappings of

academic scholarship to give a false legitimacy to claims that Greek

mythology records encounters with extraterrestrial beings.


PART TWO

EXTRATERRESTRIALS

IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY?

R


HE YEAR 2011 MARKS THE thirty-fifth anniversary of

Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1976; revised 1998), one

of the most important works in the ancient astronaut genre. It

has been fairly well-established that Temple’s thesis about

extraterrestrial visitation has little basis in fact. Temple had claimed that

an African tribe called the Dogon had sophisticated knowledge of the

invisible companion to the star Sirius, known to modern astronomers as

Sirius B, and that this knowledge derived from amphibious aliens that

descended to earth in ancient Sumeria thousands of years ago and were

worshipped as gods. Their possession of esoteric knowledge of deep

space unknown in the West until the nineteenth century is taken as proof

of extraterrestrial contact.

Though anthropologists failed to find a genuine Sirius B

tradition among the Dogon outside what they had gleaned from recent

contact with Europeans (Van Beek 139-167), and skeptics refuted

Temple’s extraterrestrial conclusions, The Sirius Mystery continues to

serve as a standard reference work in the New Age and alternative

archaeology movements. In the past few years alone, works such as

Christopher Penczak’s Ascension Magick (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2007),

R. M. Decker’s 35 Minutes to Mars (Galde Press, 2004), and Stephen S.

Mehler’s The Land of Osiris (Adventures Unlimited, 2002) utilize

Temple’s book to a greater or lesser extent to support their alternative

and New Age claims. The internet, too, is a hotbed of Temple-derived

Sirius theories. And, of course, Temple continues to publish books of

alternative archaeology, including most recently The Sphinx Mystery

(with Olivia Temple, Inner Traditions, 2009). Therefore, renewed study

of The Sirius Mystery is no moot point but an inquiry into an active and

important touchstone for the alternative movement.

T


It is not my intention to review the case against Temple’s

space-faring fish-men and their watery revelations. Such work has

already been done, exhaustively, and, to most skeptics’ minds,

conclusively.1 Instead, I would like to explore Robert Temple’s misuse of

Greek mythology, specifically the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, to

refute frequently repeated claims that, even if one doubts his most

outrageous conclusions, Temple is “scholarly, careful, and scientifically

honest” (Wilson 78). Temple is frequently described as a “recognized

scholar” (Kennedy 149) or even as a “preeminent scholar of

mathematics, astronomy and mythology” (Spenser and South) by

proponents of alternative claims, and Temple himself cites his

membership in the Royal Astronomical Society2 and several classicist

organizations to bolster Sirius’s claims to scholarship. An examination of

the case of Temple v. Jason will demonstrate that claims for Temple’s

Sirius scholarship are less solid than the case for the alleged aliens

themselves.

Of Aliens and Argonauts In Sirius, Temple makes a number of claims about Greek

mythology in general and the story of Jason in particular, which he sees

as a governing myth tying together all the threads of his Sirius mystery.

Temple uses Jason’s legendary journey as a starting point for his forays

into Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern mythology, and there is the

strong impression that he views Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece as

parallel to his own search for the extraterrestrial secrets of the flying

space frogs. For him, the Jason story is the one Greek myth most closely

related to an esoteric tradition of alien-derived knowledge of the true

nature of the binary Sirius star system—and he even views the

Argonauts as the biological ancestors of the Dogon. In order to

understand the scaffolding on which Temple builds his mythological

claims, let us briefly review Jason’s story as it has come down to us.


Jason was the son of Aeson, deposed king of Iolcus and rightful

heir to the throne held by his usurping uncle Pelias. Pelias promised to

restore the kingdom to Jason on condition that Jason bring the Golden

Fleece from the kingdom of Colchis back to Iolcus, a quest Pelias is sure

will end in Jason’s death. Jason therefore assembles fifty companions

(originally unnamed but later associated with the greatest Greek heroes)

on the ship Argo and sails to Colchis, experiencing many adventures. In

Colchis, Jason fails to persuade its king to give him the fleece, and he

instead steals it from the dragon that guards it with the help of the king’s

daughter, the sorceress Medea, on condition that Jason marry her. Jason

has many more adventures on the way back to Iolcus, where he presents

the fleece and deposes his uncle. He then betrays Medea’s love, loses the

favor of the gods, and dies when a piece of the dry-docked Argo falls on

his head.

The Jason story is cited elliptically in Homer (usually dated to

c. 8th century BCE), briefly in Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 700 BCE), and is

most fully developed in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode (462 BCE) and

Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica (c. 245 BCE). Jason also appears in

some early Greek and Etruscan art, but, intriguingly, some of these

images show a different version of the legend, unrecorded in the

surviving poems, in which Jason apparently descends into the dragon’s

stomach and reemerges, aided by the goddess Athena rather than

Medea.3 Informed scholarly conjecture is that the primal Jason legend

dates to Mycenaean times (c. 1500 BCE) and originally featured a

voyage to the end of the world (rather than specifically Colchis) to

retrieve the fleece via a descent into the guardian dragon’s stomach and

a triumph over death. It is possible Jason was dismembered and

resurrected through Athena’s ministrations or his own supernatural

healing powers (Sacks et al. 125; Mackie 1-17).4 Medea may be a later

addition to the original quest tale, though she must have appeared

before 700 BCE, as she is in Hesiod. Such history is not considered in

Sirius, despite at least two centuries of scholarly discussion about it.


Figure 5: Jason emerging from the dragon, Douris painter, fifth century BCE.

(Wikimedia Commons)

For Temple, the Jason myth is much more than an adventure.

His views on Jason are somewhat difficult to follow, scattered as they are

through Sirius, but the abridged version runs like this:

Jason and the fifty Argonauts represent Sirius A (the main star

we see in the sky) and the fifty-year period it takes Sirius B (the hidden

companion star) to travel around Sirius A. The Argo, their boat, is the

system taken as a whole with its fifty oars representing each year of

Sirius B’s orbit (Temple 95-96). In this, the Argonauts are therefore the

equivalent of the Annunaki, the fifty anonymous gods of Sumer

(remember the Argonauts were originally unnamed), who therefore are


also symbols for Sirius B’s fifty-year orbit (Temple 120). Jason, whose

name Temple believes means “appeaser,” is a feckless wimp (154) who

usurped his position in a myth-cycle that originally centered on the epic

voyage of Herakles (Hercules) (156), who in turn is a later remolding of

a still-earlier mythological figure, Briareus, one of the hundred-handed,

fifty-headed monsters who assaulted Olympus and were imprisoned in

Tartarus. Therefore, Temple concludes, Briareus was the original

captain of the Argo (220). Confusingly, and perhaps in partial

contradiction, Jason is also identified as a version of the Sumerian hero

Gilgamesh, primarily on the basis of both having fifty companions and

many adventures (Temple 118-119).

From this framework, Temple then branches out into

increasingly fanciful excursions that are beyond the scope of this article.

Since Temple’s defenders frequently cite his deep scholarship

and thorough understanding of mythology and ancient history, it is only

fair to ask how scholarly Temple’s mythological framework is. We can

begin by dispensing with one point easily enough. The “feckless” Jason

was the creation of Apollonius of Rhodes, who was writing in the

Hellenistic period, five or six hundred years after the Homeric age of

epic poetry, and a full millennium after the Jason tale may have

originated in Mycenaean Greece. Apollonius purposely recast the hero

as a vulnerable but brave human in keeping with the tastes and values of

the era (Jackson 155-162). Since this is a late development, it can have

no bearing on the original myth or its supposed extraterrestrial

antecedents. Similarly, I can find no support for Temple’s view that

Jason’s name means “appeaser,” as nearly every scholarly source derives

his name from the Greek word “to heal” (Mackie 2).5 Temple provides

no citation beyond his own assertion, and I am unable to determine his

reasoning for his claim.

* * *


Jason and the Secrets of the Space Frogs These minor points safely dispensed with, we can move on to

the meat of Temple’s Jason argument. Let us begin by asking on what

grounds Temple identifies Jason as Herakles and Herakles as Briareus

and/or Gilgamesh. Here, fortunately, Temple has made our job easy. In

all these cases, the source of his identifications (and, indeed, it appears

the entirety of his knowledge of Greek myth) is Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths (1955), which he explicitly cites. Graves identifies Jason

and Herakles thus: “Jason and Herakles are, in fact, the same character

so far as the marriage-task myth is concerned … Jason was, of course, a

title of Herakles” (602). Here Graves argues that both stories reflect

tasks associated with sacred kingship, and that Herakles at one point

bore the title of a Jason (i.e., “healer,” a meaning Temple previously

rejected). This is not exactly the same as saying that Herakles captained

the Argo, and Temple appears to go farther than Graves on this point.

Similarly thin is the ground uniting Herakles and Briareus.

Graves holds that the Pillars of Herakles were once associated with

Briareus and later assigned to Herakles after the Briareus myth “faded

from memory,” though he does say (without evidence or explanation)

that the earliest Herakles was named Briareus (497). Temple’s troubles

are compounded when we discover that Graves identifies Herakles

directly with Gilgamesh (451) without the need for Briareus or reference

to the Argonauts. Worse, Graves specifically identifies Achilles as

another Gilgamesh “variant,” and he cites the older myth of Jason’s

descent into the dragon’s stomach (one Temple ignores) as related to the

Bible’s tale of Jonah and the whale, Jonah being cited as synonymous

with Marduk, the Babylonian god!

As the reader may have guessed, Graves, who was a poet and

novelist rather than an academic, had a particular and penchant for

finding fanciful correspondences between mythological characters and

for imposing his idiosyncratic views on the Greek myths. Immediately

upon publication of The Greek Myths reviewers attacked Graves for his


“defective scholarship” (Rose 208) for which there was “no conceivable

evidence” to support his “inaccuracies, evasions, improbable analogies,

and amateur etymologies” (Macpherson 17). In short, his scholarship

was not to be trusted, and no reputable scholar would use Graves’s

theories without copious documentary support, which is not to be found

in The Sirius Mystery. However, Temple sees Graves as “invaluable”

and “superb” (146).

For Robert Temple to rely on Graves’s book not just as a

convenient secondary reference for Greek myths but as the foundation

for his understanding of mythology and the interrelationship of myths to

one another is simply unsupportable. Even when Temple began writing

Sirius in 1967, Graves’s missteps were well-known; by the time of the

1998 revision of Sirius, continued reliance on these erroneous

interpretations was inexcusable.

There is a further complication here for Temple’s theory.

Given the vast period of time over which the Jason myth was told and

retold, from the Bronze Age to late versions written under the Roman

Empire, it would stand to reason that prehistoric Sirius lore should best

be preserved in the oldest versions of and allusions to the myth, those

closest in time to the aliens and their teachings. But Temple does not

consider this and instead takes Graves’s version as “standard” (minus

the apparently interchangeable heroes). All this on top of the fact that Graves himself warns that older Argonaut stories were nothing like the story from the Hellenistic age! (581).

Other than a superficial swipe at Herakles’ and Orpheus’

appearance in Apollonius, Temple makes no attempt to separate late

interpolations from older traditions, thus presenting every scrap of

legend from 1500 BCE to 250 BCE as part of one unified Sirius-Jason

complex, as though the myth were unchanged in its details for a

thousand years. This would be the equivalent of trying to study early

medieval Britain using only Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1856-1885)

and a rough idea that King Arthur lived in the Dark Ages. Obviously,


one cannot claim on the basis of a modern retelling of a late version of a

myth that an African tribe is the flesh-and-blood descendants of these

mythic heroes.

At this point, it should go without saying that any direct

relationship between Jason’s fifty oarsmen and the “fifty” Anunnaki is

entirely speculative. While the Anunnaki may occasionally be referred to

as fifty in number (though Temple gives no source for this), their

numbers vary in myth. The Babylonians, for example, considered them

to be three hundred in number (Turner and Coulter 59). However, to

give the devil his due, Gilgamesh did have fifty companions in the

earliest versions of his myth (c. 2000 BCE), though these were left out of

the later versions of the first and second millenniums BCE, the versions

current when the Jason myth was promulgated and eventually recorded.

However, as half of one hundred, fifty was an exceedingly common

number in mythology, and unless we choose to read all reference to fifty

as Sirius lore, there needs to be something more than linguistic

convenience to justify such an interpretation of a rather standard poetic

number.6

Conclusions I hope this review of Temple’s misuse ancient myth in The

Sirius Mystery has accomplished two things: first, to demonstrate that

an author who cannot be trusted in big things (the truth of

extraterrestrial visitation) cannot be trusted in small things either; and

second, to put to rest the persistent myth that even if one does not

support Temple’s conclusions about intelligent space-faring frogmen

that his scholarship and erudition are still an important contribution to

the study of ancient mythology and history.

There is a bit of poetic irony in all this, too. Robert Temple’s

knowledge of Jason and the Argonauts, and the story’s history and

development, seems to derive entirely from Robert Graves and his

Greek Myths. Temple does not directly cite the Jason tales of Hesiod,


Pindar, and Apollonius, the ancient authors from whom we derive our

knowledge of the myth.7 Had he done so, he might just have noticed a

curious passage in Apollonius, who describes Medea’s first glimpse of

Jason at their clandestine meeting in Hecate’s temple: “[H]e appeared to

her as she desired, like Sirius leaping high from Ocean…” (88). There

you have it: Jason is Sirius! Of course, this is nothing but a bit of poetic

simile, but its omission underscores just how poorly researched The Sirius Mystery really is, despite its hundreds of endnotes and reputation

as the thinking person’s ancient astronaut book.


Notes

1 See bibliography in The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry for the Dogon for a partial

list of skeptical critiques and rebuttals (http://www.skepdic.com/dogon.html). 2 The RAS is “open to any person over the age of eighteen” with no formal

qualifications or scholarly requirements and membership does not imply the organization’s

official endorsement or support of its members’ views (see “How to Join” at

http://www.ras.org.uk/). The same applies to the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic

Studies, the Egypt Exploration Society, and the Royal Historical Society, all of which

Temple listed as affiliations in the 1998 Sirius. 3 Temple reproduces (reversed) one such image in the 1998 revision of Sirius

and identifies the female figure with Medea, despite the obvious armor, aegis, and owl

(not, as Temple claims, an oracular dove), Athena’s symbols. He also misidentifies

Athena’s Medusa-head breastplate as a “serpent” and her armor as dragon scales. Temple

confesses ignorance of the image’s meaning, implying that he neither recalled Graves’s

interpretation of this image nor researched the scholarly literature, which had discussed the

image since at least the nineteenth century. In another plate (again mirror reversed), he

misidentifies a standard scene of Medea magically resurrecting a ram as an alchemical

transmutation of a ram into gold and Pelias as Jason, demonstrating his lack of familiarity

with the scholarly literature and Greek mythology in general. 4 In fact, Iolcus was a Mycenaean center with an extensive shipyard, which is

perhaps why the Jason legend begins there. 5 Mackie informs me that “appeaser” is “a very secondary etymology” that

does not appear in the scholarly literature about Jason (personal communication, July 30,

2009). 6 Cf. the frequent ancient practice of using a round number like 1,000 or

10,000 as a synonym for an uncountable number (as we do with “zillions”), or the

frequent appearance of triads and trinities in myth. Some numbers apparently are more

poetic than others and need not refer to alien sky science. 7 Temple includes these authors in his bibliography, but while his endnotes cite

passages from Hesiod and Pindar, these are not passages related to the Argonauts, a

striking omission given the admitted centrality of the Argonaut story to The Sirius Mystery. I was unable to find a single direct citation of Apollonius (or Hesiod’s or Pindar’s

Jason tales) unmediated through Graves.


Works Cited

Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece. Trans. Richard

Hunter. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Finding Atlantis. National Geographic Channel. 13 Mar. 2011.

Television.

Fritze, Ronald H. Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Jackson, S. “Apollonius’ Jason: Human Being in an Epic Scenario.”

Greece & Rome 39.2 (1992): 155-162. Web. JSTOR.

Kennedy, J. Beyond the Rainbow: Renewing the Cosmic Connection. Buy Books, 2004. Print.

Mackie, C. J. “The Earliest Jason.” Greece and Rome 48.1 (2001): 1-

17. Web. JSTOR.

Macpherson, J. Review of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. Phoenix 21.1 (1958): 17. Print.

“Martin Sieff.” The Velikovsky Encyclopedia. 11 Apr. 2009. Web.

Owen, Edward. “Lost City of Atlantis ‘Buried in Spanish Wetlands.’”

The Telegraph. 14 Mar. 2011. Web.


Paipetis, S. A. The Unknown Technology in Homer. History of

Mechanism and Machine Science. Vol. 9. Dordecht: Springer,

2010.

Rose, H. J. Review of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. The Classical Review 5.2 (1955): 208. Web. JSTOR.

Sacks, D., O. Murray, and M. Bunson. A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 Print.

Sieff, Martin. “Book Review: ‘Atlantis.’” The Washington Times 25

Feb. 2011. Web.

Spenser, L. R. and C. L. South. The Oz Factors: The Wizard of Oz as an Analogy to the Mysteries of Life. Lulu, 1999. n.pag. Print.

Temple, Robert. The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books,

1998. Print.

Turner, P. and C. R. Coulter. Dictionary of Ancient Deities. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.

Van Beek, Walter. “Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work

of Marcel Griaule.” Current Anthropology 32.2 (1991): 139-

167. Print.

Wilson, R. A. Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati. Ronin Publishing, 1992. Print.

Winchester, Simon. “Swallowed by the Sea.” Newsweek / The Daily Beast. 20 Mar. 2011. Web.

About the Author

Jason Colavito is an author and editor based in Albany, NY. His books

include The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Prometheus Books, 2005); Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre (McFarland,

2008); and more. His research on extraterrestrials in ancient history has

been featured on the History Channel. Colavito is internationally

recognized by scholars, literary theorists, and scientists for his pioneering

work exploring the connections between science, pseudoscience, and

speculative fiction. His investigations examine the way human beings

create and employ the supernatural to alter and understand our reality

and our world.

Visit his website at http://www.JasonColavito.com and follow him on

Twitter @JasonColavito.

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